Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan, Essay 7

Horace Greeley

By John Quincy Adams Ward, dedicated 1890

Bibliography & Out-takes

• Index page for OMOM bibliography, out-takes and discussion questions

• Published comments on the sculpture

• On the sculptor, John Quincy Adams Ward

• On the pedestal, by Richard Morris Hunt

• On the subject, Horace Greeley

• Photos: Forgotten Delights blog entry for 12/30/06, with a close-up of the faces of Ward's Greeley and Doyle's Greeley, and blog entry for 5/15/07, with a comment on Greeley's "Literature as Vocation" (see below). Forgotten Delights Salute, with a description of Greeley's first sight of New York (1831). A Thomas Nast caricature of Greeley appears at the end of this article.

Published comments on the sculpture

Harper's Weekly 10/04/1890, p. 767a and 9/27/1890, pp. 760-1. On the Doyle statue, see the issue of 6/15/1889.

Henry Luther Stoddard, Horace Greeley, Printer, Editor, Crusader (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1946), p. 324: noting that of the many sculptures then in New York City, "none attracted so much attention. Save that of Lincoln, it was the only one that did not have to be identified for most people."

Mildred Adams, "Our Statues Regain Places in the Sun," New York Times 7/21/1935: the Greeley statues by Doyle and Ward "sadden the heart of any lover of journalism, American history or bronze figures. Both of them cry out to Mr. Moses for scrubbing and refinishing."

Edward Alden Jewell, "Winds of Scorn for Our Statues," New York Times 8/21/1938: "Certain grand old gentlemen, though, I sincerely trust, may never be retired [to a Park Sculpture Museum]. The City Hall Park's Horace Greeley, who meditates so charmingly in his tasseled parlor chair, seated beneath his single coy little tree, would seem bereft indeed in a museum."

Lederer, Joseph. All Around the Town: A Walking Guide to Outdoor Sculpture in New York City (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975), pp. 32-33.

Gayle, Margot, and Michele Cohen. The Art Commission and the Municipal Art Society Guide to Manhattan's Outdoor Sculpture (New York: Prentice Hall, 1988), pp. 47 on Ward and 115 on Doyle.

Reynolds, Donald. Monuments and Masterpieces (Thames & Hudson, 1993), pp. 173-74.

Text of New York City Department of Park's historical marker

SIRIS (Smithsonian Institution, Inventory of American Sculpture) IAS 77006755.

On the sculptor, John Quincy Adams Ward

American National Biography: Lewis I. Sharp. "Ward, John Quincy Adams"; http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00903.html ; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

See also the notes to Ward's statue of Washington at Broad St.

On the pedestal, by Richard Morris Hunt

American National Biography: Paul R. Baker. "Hunt, Richard Morris"; http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00435.html; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Baker, Paul R. Richard Morris Hunt (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 310.

Stein, Susan, ed. The Architecture of Richard Morris Hunt (University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 115 and 137.

On the subject, Horace Greeley

American National Biography: Erik S. Lunde. "Greeley, Horace"; http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00653.html ; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Greeley on the winter of 1831 (Recollections of a Busy Life [New York, 1868], p. 87): "The Winter was a hard one, and business in New York stagnant to an extent not now conceivable. I think it was early in December, when a 'cold snap' of remarkable severity closed the Hudson, and sent up the price of coal at a bound to $16 per ton, while the cost of other necessaries of life took a kindred but less considerable elevation. Our city stood as if besieged till Spring relieved her; and it was much the same every Winter. ...The earnings of good mechanics did not average $8 per week in 1831-32, while they are now double that sum; and living is not twice as dear as it then was. Meat may possibly be; but Bread is not; Fuel is not; Clothing is not; while travel is cheaper; and our little cars have enabled working-men to live two or three miles from their work without serious cost or inconvenience; thus bringing Yorkville or Green Point practically as near to Maiden Lane or Broad Street as Greenwich or the Eleventh Ward was. Winter is relatively dull now, but not nearly so stagnant as it formerly was."

Greeley on the purpose of the Tribune, which he founded in 1841 (Recollections pp. 141-42): "The Tribune, as it first appeared, was but the germ of what I sought to make it. No journal sold for a cent could ever be much more than a dry summary of the most important or the most interesting occurrences of the day; and such is not a newspaper, in the higher sense of the term. We need to know, not only what is done, but what is purposed and said, by those who sway the destinies of states and realms; and, to this end, the prompt perusal of the manifestoes of monarchs, presidents, ministers, legislators, etc., is indispensable. No man is even tolerably informed in our day who does not regularly 'keep the run' of events and opinions, through the daily perusal of at least one good journal; and the ready cavil that 'no one can read' all that a great modern journal contains, only proves the ignorance or thoughtlessness of the caviler. No one person is expected to take such an interest in the rise and fall of stocks, the markets for cotton, cattle, grain and goods, the proceedings of Congress, Legislatures, and Courts, the politics of Europe, and the ever-shifting phases of Spanish-American anarchy, etc., etc., as would incite him to a daily perusal of the entire contents of a metropolitan city journal of the first rank. The idea is rather to embody in a single sheet the information daily required by all those who aim to keep 'posted' on every important occurrence; so that the lawyer, the merchant, the banker, the forwarder, the economist, the author, the politician, etc., may find here whatever he needs to see, and be spared the trouble of looking elsewhere."

Greeley on Lincoln (Recollections p. 404): "There are those who say that Mr. Lincoln was fortunate in his death as in his life: I judge otherwise. I hold him most inapt for the leadership of a people involved in desperate, agonizing war; while I deem few men better fitted to guide a nation’s destinies in time of peace. Especially do I deem him eminently fitted to soothe, to heal, and to reunite in bonds of true, fraternal affection a people just lapsing into peace after years of distracting, desolating internal strife. His true career was just opening when an assassin’s bullet quenched his light of life. Mr. Lincoln entered Washington the victim of a grave delusion. A genial, quiet, essentially peaceful man, trained in the ways of the bar and the stump, he fully believed that there would be no civil war, - no serious effort to consummate Disunion. His faith in Reason as a moral force was so implicit that he did not cherish a doubt that his Inaugural Address, whereon he had bestowed much thought and labor, would, when read throughout the South, dissolve the Confederacy as frost is dissipated by vernal sun. I sat just behind him as he read it, on a bright, warm, still March day, expecting to hear its delivery arrested by the crack of a rifle aimed at his heart; but it pleased God to postpone the deed, though there was forty times the reason for shooting him in 1860 that there was in ’65, and at least forty times as many intent on killing or having him killed."

Greeley to the Union League Club in 1865, after they summoned him to answer for posting a bond for former Confederate President Jefferson Davis: "I do not recognize you as capable of judging or even fully apprehending me. You evidently regard me as a weak sentimentalist, misled by a maudlin philosophy. I arraign you as narrow-minded blockheads who would like to be useful in a great cause but don’t know how. Your attempt to base a great enduring party on the hate and wrath necessarily engendered by a bloody civil war is as though you should plant a colony on an iceberg which had somehow drifted into a tropical sea. I will tell you here, out of a life devoted to the good of mankind, that your children will select my going to Richmond and signing that bail bond as the wisest act and will feel that it did more for freedom and humanity than all of you were competent to do. … Understand once for all that I dare you and defy you. So long as any man was working to overthrow our government he was my enemy; from the hour in which he threw down his arms he was my formerly erring countryman.” Quoted in Henry Luther Stoddard, Horace Greeley, Printer, Editor, Crusader (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1946), p. 236.

Greeley on “Literature as a Vocation” (Recollections p. 451): "It is a very common but a very mischievous notion, that the writing of a book is creditable per se. On the contrary, I hold it discreditable, and only to be justified by proof of lofty qualities and generous aims embodied therein. To write a book when you have nothing new to communicate, - nothing to say that has not been better said already, - that is to inflict a real injury on mankind. A new book is only to be justified by a new truth. If Jonas Potts, however illiterate and commonplace, has been shipwrecked on Hudson’s Bay, and has traveled thence overland to Detroit or Montreal by a route previously unknown, then he may give us a book – if he will attempt no more than to tell us as clearly as possible what he experienced and saw by the way, - which will have a genuine value, and which the world may well thank him for; and so of a man who, having manufactured charcoal all his days, should favor us with a treatise on burning charcoal, showing what was the relative value for that use of the various woods; how long they should be on the fire respectively; how much wood should be burned in one pit, and how the burning should be managed. Every contribution, however rude and humble, to our knowledge of nature, and of the means by which her products may most advantageously be made subservient to our needs, is beneficent, and worthy of our regard. But the fabrication of new poems, or novels, or essays, or histories, which really add nothing to our stock of facts, to our fund of ideas, but, so far as they have any significance, merely resay what has been more forcibly, intelligibly, happily, said already, - this is a work which does less than no good, - which ought to be decried and put down, under the general police duty of abating nuisances. I would have every writer of a book cited before a competent tribunal and made to answer the questions: 'Sir, what proposition is this book intended to set forth and commend? What fact does it reveal? What is its drift, its purport?' If it embodies a new truth, or even a new suggestion, though it seem a very mistaken and absurd one, make way for it! and let it fight its own battle; but if it has really no other aim than to be readable, therefore salable, and thus to win gold for its author and his accomplices, the printer and the publisher, then let a bonfire be made of its manuscript sheets, so that the world may speedily obtain from it all the light it is capable of imparting."

Mark Twain, "Miscellany," in Mark Twain in Eruption, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922), pp. 347-8:  "I met Mr. Greeley only once and then by accident. It was in 1871, in the (old) Tribune office. I climbed one or two flights of stairs and went to the wrong room. I was seeking Colonel John Hay and I really knew my way and only lost it by my carelessness. I rapped lightly on the door, pushed it open and stepped in. There  sat Mr. Greeley, busy writing, with his back to me. I think his coat was off. But I knew who it was, anyway. It was not a pleasant situation, for he had the reputation of being pretty plain with strangers who interrupted his train of thought. The interview was brief. Before I could pull myself together and back out, he whirled around and glared at me through his great spectacles and said:

'Well, what in hell do you want!'

'I was looking for a gentlem--'

'Don't keep them in stock - clear out!'

I could have made a very neat retort but didn't, for I was flurried and didn't think of it till I was downstairs."

William Cullen Bryant (see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 22), letter to Lyman Trumbull of 5/8/1872, on Greeley for president: "As to other public measures, there is no abuse or extravagance into which that man, through the infirmity of his judgment, may not be betrayed. ... If you conclude to support Mr. Greeley I shall of course infer that you do so because you do not know him." Correspondence VI, 62-3.

Thomas Nast caricature of Greeley, scanned from Albert Bigelow Paine, Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures (New York: Macmillan, 1904), p. 238.